USPTO Unable to Find Top Ten Patent Holders

lelitsch writes "So a journalist tries to interview the top ten patent holders in the US. As he finds out, neither the USPTO, nor the patent processing companies are able to identify them. Even more surprisingly, "America's greatest inventor is apparently an obscure guy in Japan who makes stuff most people can't comprehend. And the nation's greatest native inventor seems to be a man who has come up with 100 different ways to make a flower pot.""

Yes

[comm3c (670264)]

Bureocracy can't find stuff? Whats new.

FP!

Re:Yes

[free space (13714)]

someone should invent a way to find those top ten ( and then patent it!)

Re:Yes

[terranwannabe (533181)]

Yet more conclusive proof of the USPTO's utter incompetence, from the people who brought you "Contradictory Patents Teach Us To Get Along" and "Everyone's Got A Little Prior Art Sometimes, That Doesn't Mean We Go Around Invalidating Patents"

Re:Yes

[by Anonymous Coward]

Yet more conclusive proof of the USPTO's utter incompetence, from the people who brought you "Contradictory Patents Teach Us To Get Along" and "Everyone's Got A Little Prior Art Sometimes, That Doesn't Mean We Go Around Invalidating Patents"

So interestingly enough one of my patents has just received its notice of allowability. On its first pass through though the patent office put up quite a few objections and rejections to our claims. After we went over them we found that about 20% were basically due to vague language on our part. The remaining 80% were flagged by the USPTO as already claimed, though in reality they were not related at all, and once we pointed this out the USPTO agreed and dropped their objections.

So I would have to say that my patent is now a much stronger one thanks to the feedback from the USPTO, and I was impressed by how wide of a net they cast in looking for precedent. Now of course I'm a hardware engineer, so perhaps they are stronger in this area. But in this one case I feel they did a good job.

- AC cause my legal team wouldn't even want me to say this much - Lawyers sheesh...

Re:Yes

[OohAhh (745216)]

Of course you feel the USPTO did a good job, you got what you wanted. Now what if in fact they were initially right and you were wrong? What if they simply allowed themselves to be persuaded by inadequate arguments in order to save time and get the application processed? It's easy enough to be happy with a system that gives you exactly what you want, but that isn't evidence that it's working.

Re:Yes

[dtfinch (661405)]

Until I find a better one, perhaps one of my favorite patents is #6,341,372 [uspto.gov], desribing a "Universal machine translator of arbitrary languages", able to make perfect translations in real time with zero knowledge of either language, like on Star Trek. It goes on to talk about such translaters being used by androids powered by perpetual motion. The rest is just chapters upon chapters full of philosophical ranting about existance, quantum physics, and the universe, maybe pasted from another source. Filed in 1997, granted in 2002. I came across this patent while searching to see how many "perpetual motion" patents the USPTO has granted so far.

Re:Yes

[internewt (640704)]

The rest is just chapters upon chapters full of philosophical ranting about existance, quantum physics, and the universe, maybe pasted from another source.

It does look like the text is from elsewhere. I skipped through the text of the patent, just to see if it is all solid ramblings, and spotted the below in the section titled "DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS"

Aware of its existence, the android perceives and changes the same reality of human corporal experience, including the reality of the cosmos. This book, an introduction to the theory and science of androids, is intended to acquaint the reader with this new technological finding and to mark the beginning of an androidal age in which sentient machines alter the human universe.[My emphasis]

So it looks to me like this patent wasn't even fully read before being granted, though it looks to be about 12000 words!

Re:Yes

[frdmfghtr (603968)]

I wonder if they tried Googling for them yet :)

Re:Yes

[lgftsa (617184)]

In this case I think it's a good thing. Of the three people he specifically mentions, he insults and belittles two of them. Whoever the top ten are, they must be pretty relieved right about now.

Local zoo...

[creimer (824291)]

If the monkey house at the local zoo can produce Shakespearian writers, imagine what they can do for patent applications! I'm sure they will have different ideas about getting the peanut out of the shell -- or designing flower pots.

Re:Local zoo...

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist (906833)]

you only need an infinite number to guarantee you recreate the works of Shakespear. in reality, so long as you're willing to wait longer, you can get away with a finite number of monkeys (a single monkey working for an infinite amount of time works too).

generally, you can recreate Hamlet in about 3 months with a team of 10 monkeys working 8 hours a day.

Re:Local zoo...

[raoul666 (870362)]

Easy. You have an infinite number of monkeys reading it.

Same name problem

[ReformedExCon (897248)]

Lots of people with the same name in that database.

Kind of like the Nobel prize a couple years ago where there were a bunch of people with the same name in the research department of the winner in Japan.

For those that didn't read the article, USPTO is bad and grants too many broad patents to obvious and common things.

so sad...

[Rabid_Llama (873072)]

The thing is, anyone can get a patent. Much like the flower pot guy, quantity of patents does not necessarily mean that the person is the best inventor. Perhaps a better topic would have been the top 10 most productive or innovative inventors. Dean Kamen gets my vote on both.

What's frightening about all this...

[Niraj59 (935921)]

After reading the article I got to thinking about the controversy surrounding the subjective assessment of a patent. When does a patent become too general? When does it go from covering an invention to covering something that is convention?

I think it's especially terrifying in the computer world because it seems that many USPTO employees don't know what is standard practice and what is innovation. This article from Salon [salon.com] reviews some ridiculous patents and patent claims

Generally subjectivity plays a small role in governmental organizations (think about the IRS and all its coded forms). It seems that the USPTO is a strange organization in that sense. Does anyone know how the process works? To me it seems as if it's just reviewed by a bunch of people who may or may not understand what it is their awarding a patent to.

Typical - the PTO doesn't care about the inventors

[Savantissimo (893682)]

It really shows the orientation and priorities of the system when the PTO can can instantly find a list of the top-patent-assignment-receiving companies, but go 9 years between looks at who the top inventors are. It shouldn't be that difficult for any decent database to handle, after all, despite what that jounalist was told.

The system needs to be recast to benefit the inventors and society, not the horrible corporate givaway currently being plotted in Congress under the guise of patent reform.

"A database operator's nightmare"

[I Like Pudding (323363)]

Here, let me jump on this mighty grenade for the PTO:

select user_id, num_patents from (
  select
    u.id user_id, count(p.id) num_patents
  from
    patents p, users u
  where
    u.id = p.user_id
    and p.status in ('APPROVED', 'ACTIVE', 'QUITE SILLY')
  group by
    u.id
  order by
    num_patents desc
) where rowcount < 11

To whom do I send my bill?

Re:"A database operator's nightmare"

[back_pages (600753)]

Here, let me jump on this mighty grenade for the PTO:

I know you're trying to be funny, but your suggestion would be inadequate.

There's no analogy to a "user_id" for issued patents. There's no requirement that an inventor record his name the same way (James Doe vs. Jim Doe) and there are more than a handful of foreign language inventors who change the English spelling over time. There's also the issue of joint inventorship. You invent a powerswitch that makes electric tools more efficient and file 3 applications: with Steve the electric drill inventor, with Tim the electric saw inventor, and with Bill the electric belt sander inventor. You also file an additional application with William (who happens to be Bill) for an electric rotary sander. You have invented one powerswitch, but your name shows up on 4 patent applications (with 3 different people). People get married, omit middle names, omit "Jr." and more.

And finally, seriously, who the feck cares who has the most inventions? Who really thinks the patent office needs to assemble a team? Get right on this? Grab this bull by the horns? It's hard to imagine a more frivolous outrage.

I know you were just cracking a joke, but eh. The patent office has a public search facility. Stop by if you're in Alexandria VA. I happen to be somewhat familiar with what they've got in their database and why it's not so simple to answer this question. If you want to know how many times a particular name appears on a patent it would be simple to produce, but that is not the same question as who has made the most inventions.

This is analogous to the difference between what the spec says and what the customer wants. You build the product to the spec but that wasn't what the customer wanted. I'd think that this should be a familiar concept on Slashdot, but suddenly everyone is so shocked by precisely the same phenomenon. Honestly I think the patent office should have just patronized the guy and told him whose name appears on the most patents. It wouldn't come remotely close to actually answering the question about who has the most inventions, but who the feck cares?

PATENT APPLICATION #1588003

[dirtsurfer (595452)]

Summary: A system for calculating the top 10 US patent holders.

"an obscure guy in Japan who makes stuff..."

[Riktov (632)]

"...most people can't comprehend."

You mean this stuff [methodshop.com]?

The (sort of) correct list.

[Jerry Coffin (824726)]

As I read this, /. was displaying a fortune cookie that alluded to 42 as the meaning of life. A rather interesting coincidence, since I suspect the original questioner didn't really think through and understand the question very well. For example, if one person is the secondary inventor on three patents, while another is the primary inventor on two patents, which is the more prolific inventor?

So, I'm going to restrict the question a little bit. First of all, I'm only going to look at the primary inventor on any given patent. Second, I'm going to ignore the fact that not every name on earth uniquely identifies an individual person. Finally, for the sake of letting my computer get back to more important things like folding protiens, I'm only going to look at about the last 10 years worth of patents (and in fairness, I haven't updated my database for the last few months either, so it's possible the last couple might have changed since then -- and it's quite possible all of these numbers are now a bit higher). Finally, I'm restricting this to US Utility patents, not plant patents, design patents, etc.

Within those guidelines, the top 10 inventors and number of patents credited to each are:

1. Shunpei Yamazaki: 744
2. Donald E. Weder: 702
3. Kia Silverbrook: 602
4. Mark I. Gardner: 344
5. Salman Akram: 321
6. Warren M. Farnworth: 280
7. Ravi Kumar Arimilli: 269
8. Leonard Forbes: 238
9. Jay S. Walker: 223
10. Jennifer L. Hillman: 222

Nicely enough, all of these names even look like ones that stand a reasonable possibility of being unique (among patenting inventors).

Re:hmmm

[samkass (174571)]

As I recall, Microsoft has never been near the top on a per-year basis, so they have no chance of being at the top overall. I would be surprised if they ever broke the top-20 patenters on a per-year basis, let alone be even in the top-50 cumulative. (From my googling, they appear to have been in 29th place for last year.) Microsoft's reputation as an innovator was historically earned mostly in the marketing and sales arenas, not the technological one, although in recent years they've acquired a lot of talent. We'll see what they make of it in the future.

IBM has been in first place for the last 12 years straight, is the only company ever to break 2,000 patents per year (in 2004 they got 3,277), and last year got about 2/3 more patents than the 2nd place finisher.

http://www.iptoday.com/pdf_current/Reports/Rprt_05 _Scorecard.pdf [iptoday.com]

Re:hmmm

[mabinogi (74033)]

According to the article IBM is the #1 company - but they were looking for individuals.

Personally I'd be suprised it Microsoft made the top 100, they've not been around for as long as the heavyweights, and their field has been fairly limited until recently.

Re:Some Database

[HunterZ (20035)]

If they can't do a quick query to see who owns the most patents, is it so very odd that they can't do a simple search and find prior art for the patents they grant today?

Well, you see, I patented both of those ideas already and am refusing to let the patent office use them ;)

Re:U.S. of A.

[Pantero Blanco (792776)]

"We try to be its policeman and end up with egg on our faces for the last 40+ years."

So South Korea and Kuwait could've won their freedom from oppressors on their own, and all the nations under Soviet control in eastern Europe (whose elected leaders all mysteriously died at the same time) were nice and happy? Taiwan and China could come to a peaceable understanding?

I agree with a lot of your criticisms about modern America, but I think your absolutist view of its involvement in the past half-century is a bit short-sighted. Its reputation isn't squeaky clean (ie, Lumumba in Congo), but there have been some genuine righteous triumphs as well.